Favorite Schools

Favorite Teams

Alabama

Change Region

comments

How do you stop asteroid on collision course with Earth? Just a little nudge, UAH professor says (video)

richard fork

Dr. Richard Fork, an electrical and computer engineering professor at UAH who is the principal investigator for the Laser Science and Engineering Laboratory, explains the asteroid deflection system. (Michael Mercier/UAH photo)

If a big one came along and was on target to hit earth, there would be nothing we could do at this time.

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - Inside a tiny fourth-floor office of the Optics Building on the campus of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Richard Fork is trying to save the world.

View full sizeIn the UAH system, a laser-equipped spacecraft orbiting within a few kilometers of the asteroid would send trains of ultrashort optical pulses to the reflecting optical systems on the micro-spacecraft directly orbiting the asteroid. (UAH photo illustration)

Fork, an electrical and computer engineering professor, has devised a way to protect earth from small asteroids on track to hit the planet that could be devastating to life as we know it.

"If a big one came along and was on target to hit Earth, there would be nothing we could do at this time," Fork said. "We don't have a real solution. There is a NASA program to try to find things to do and they are having discussions currently."

On Feb. 15, an asteroid burned up entering the Earth's atmosphere and the explosion rained meteors across the Russian city of Chelyabinsk - lighting up the dark sky like the midday sun, shattering windows and knocking people to the ground with the shock wave (see dramatic video below or click here).

When the asteroid exploded about 14 miles above the Earth's surface in Russia, it released 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima near the end of World War II, NASA said.

It also gave energy to researchers to figure out how to deflect asteroids that could be more powerful and wreak far more havoc than the relatively small Chelyabinsk meteor.

"When the asteroid struck Chelyabinsk in Russia, for us, it was a good thing because it stimulated the interest about what can you do about these things," Fork said.

And he has an idea.

It focuses on using ultra-sharp pulses to nudge asteroids away from a track to crash into the earth. No explosions, no Hollywood drama, just a little nudge in just the right place to cause the asteroid to sail right past Earth.

"As far as I'm concerned, ultra-sharp pulses can do things to deflect asteroids that are on track to hit Earth better than any other alternative," Fork said. "As you can imagine, it's kind of a tough job. That's one reason nobody's really done it or solved it. We don't know exactly what to do.

"The problem with an asteroid is it's moving rapidly and it's big and the question is, what can you do - especially if we get some of these comets coming in like Hale-Bopp on short notice."

The Hale-Bopp comet, believed to be 19 to 25 miles across by NASA, passed about 120 million miles from Earth in 1997.

While Fork's solution to simply nudge an asteroid away from Earth perhaps sounds simple enough, the execution of the nudge is just as complex.

Fork envisions having three micro-spacecraft orbit the asteroid and simultaneously serve as conduits to fire ultra-sharp laser pulses from a fourth, primary spacecraft at specific targets on the asteroid at the same time in a sort of tripod assault.

The primary spacecraft would transport and deploy the three micro-spacecraft and would, through computers, sort of supervise the asteroid assault. A series of ultra-short pulses would then be fired at the asteroid until it was safely off-course to hit Earth.

If it strains the imagination to conceive such an idea, it's a natural solution to Fork - who had a long career at Bell Laboratories working with lasers before joining the faculty at UAH.

A graduate student working with Fork on the project, Luke Burgess, has developed an algorithm to position the micro-spacecraft around the asteroid and deliver the nudging laser pulses.

Why not just blow it up?

For now, the project would work only on smaller asteroids but Fork said with more research, it could be increased in scale to deflect larger, more dangerous asteroids. He has already pitched his idea to NASA.

Fork also said the project could be a perfect mission for the new heavy lift rocket being developed at Marshall Space Flight Center, the Space Launch System. And the project could be an economic boon in Huntsville.

"This could be an enormous number of new jobs for Huntsville," he said. "What NASA should do is have missions to go out and explore this region around earth where these bad guys can come from. If they see them early enough, we can do something. And here's a technique if they do find a big, bad guy out there.

"This is sort of an answer to those questions that haven't been answered. Not only they haven't been answered but they are important questions to answer because they could end human life if we screw up."

The obvious question, though, is why not just blow up the asteroid in the first place? That's what they would do in the movies, isn't it?

"Something's going to happen (if you blow it up) but it may not be what you want," Fork said. "This set-up is very intelligent engineering, it can push. It can know where to push and it can measure the consequence of what the push was. We know what we're doing, we can measure what we're doing and we're monitoring it."